THE number of Turkish people thought to be infected with avian flu rose to more than 50 this weekend, prompting concern that the disease may be about to spread into Europe.

Yesterday a British laboratory confirmed that a Turkish brother and sister who died last week had the feared H5N1 strain of avian flu.

A third child from the same family in Dogubayazit, in eastern Turkey, has now died of avian flu and dozens more suspected cases have emerged.

â€œThe laboratory in the UK said that they have detected H5N1 in samples of the two fatal cases,â€ said Maria Cheng, a spokeswoman for the World Health Organisation. They are the first fatalities outside East Asia.

The fact that cases of Bird Flu in humans have now been confirmed outside of Asia isn’t the real news here. What is very troubling is this quote via Instapundit:

“Professor John Oxford, an expert on flu at Queen Maryâ€™s medical school, London, said the most worrying aspect of the deaths in Turkey was the large number of human cases resulting from exposure to a small number of birds.”

What we may be observing is a very small but significant change in the pathology of the disease – its ability to infect humans may be improving. While it still cannot be spread through the air via casual contact like sneezing or coughing, it may have mutated ever so slightly so that the virus can either trick our immune system long enough to become established or, more likely, replicate at a faster pace once inside the human body thus overwhelming our bodies’ natural defenses in a shorter period of time.

Scientists are reasonably certain that at present, the virus can only be contracted by humans after eating or handling diseased fowl. Given the proximity to their livestock that many people in the rural parts of Europe live, it is perhaps not surprising that, like peasants in Southeast Asia and Indonesia, rural Europeans would be the first to contract the disease.

I hasten to add this is rank speculation on my part. No definitive word can come about any mutations in the virus for many weeks as the painstaking process of comparing the strain of virus that killed the children in Turkey is compared gene by gene with the strain we have seen in Asia. And it could very well be a statistical oddity that makes it appear there are fewer birds infecting more humans. Or scientists could just be wrong.

Having said all that, the idea that the virus wouldn’t mutate is a dangerous notion for governments to have at this point. And trying to find answers fast enough to keep ahead of the virus as it makes its way into Europe will prove to be the biggest challenge over the next few months.

As Avian Flu sweeps across Russia’s Ural Mountains, ravaging wild bird populations in the area that separates Europe from Asia and continues to threaten domestic bird stocks, the first signs of large scale human-human contact of the deadly virus are beginning to appear in Indonesia.

Health professionals from around the world have descended on Jakarta, Indonesia’s capitol city and home to 12 million people, to help contain the first truly serious outbreak of Bird Flu in a major human population center.

One of the largest cities in the world is now officially home to a Bird Flu epidemic.

Previously, humans infected with the virus were found mostly in rural areas of Viet Nam and Thailand. The outbreak in Indonesia’s largest city means that essentially, we are now at the mercy of whatever evolutionary track the virus takes. At the moment, Bird Flu can only be spread from human to human by direct contact with an infected person and either their waste products or saliva, blood, or other infected secretions. At least, this is the best guess of the experts.

The problem with a Bird Flu outbreak in a city of 12 million people boils down to simple mathematics. Each time the virus infects another human it has the opportunity when reproducing itself to mutate – change its genetic code – so that instead of spreading by direct contact it would be possible to become airborne and spread via casual contact just like any other strain of flu.

It goes without saying that having 12 million chances for the virus to mutate is extremely worrying.

Indonesian health officials aren’t standing around doing nothing. With the help of the World Health Organization (WHO) and teams of scientists and researchers from around the world, the battle to nip any Bird Flu pandemic in its infancy has begun in earnest. This article in today’s Asia Times details what officials term a “21 day Golden Period” where they hope to contain any serious outbreak:

The fate of millions of lives in Asia hangs on the speed with which a patient, infected with a human-to-human transmission of a mutated strain of bird flu, is diagnosed and prevention measures are implemented.

“We will only have a 21-day golden period to stop the virus spreading and becoming a pandemic,” said Dr Kumnuan Ungchusak, director of epidemiology at Thailand’s department o disease control and a key player in plans being mapped out to stall the virus ravaging Southeast Asia. “A longer delay, even a month, can be fatal.”

The new urgency follows the deaths announced Wednesday of two young girls admitted to Jakarta hospitals after they developed symptoms indicating bird flu. Nine others are currently under treatment for suspected bird flu in Indonesia.

Plans regarding what should be done with this 21 day “Golden Period” are both ambitious and problematic:

On Wednesday, Indonesia’s Health Minister, Siti Fadilah Supari, told reporters in Jakarta that she considered the outbreak the possible start of an epidemic on the archipelago and that “most definitely there will be others as long as we are not able to identify positively the sources”.

The pandemic-prevention scenario is expected to follow two broad paths, she explained during an interview. The first is geared toward the immediate family of the patient diagnosed with the lethal virus. Each family member coming in contact with an infected relative will be given – within two days of the patient showing symptoms – a dose of Tamiflu, the only known drug capable of stopping the spread of a mutated form of the H5N1 avian flu virus. This regime of Tamiflu will be for a 10-day period, Kumnuan said.

More challenging, though, is to provide medication for the second part of this preemptive initiative. “It would require giving [medication to] around 10,000 people, 100,000 people or even one million who live within the area where this human-to-human form of the virus has been diagnosed,’’ the Thai epidemiologist said.

Attempting to put 10,000 people (much less a million) on a virus prevention regimen is certainly ambitious. What makes it problematic is that Indonesia has nowhere near the number of Tamiflu doses to make the plan realistic.

The WHO was also working with the government to source new stocks of the anti-viral drug Tamiflu from India to bolster local stocks, he said.

“It’s not very much, it’s rather puny. They definitely need some more,” Petersen said, adding that stocks being rushed from India were less than 1,000 doses.

Tamiflu is an anti-viral tablet that can help against infection. Several companies are working on a vaccine, but tests are not expected to begin until later this year.

Supari said Indonesia had 10,000 Tamiflu tablets.

If the entire country has only 10,000 Tamiflu tablets, how does this jibe with their ambitious plans to initiate an anti-viral regimen by dosing a million people?

Another troubling feature of the Indonesian plan is that while Tamiflu may be effective as an anti-viral agent, the effectiveness of other, less expensive and more widely available antibiotics which are used to treat the symptons of the virus after infection may have been overstated:

In the second paper, researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta found that influenza viruses, particularly those from the dreaded bird flu strain, had developed high rates of resistance to the only class of cheap antiviral drugs available – drugs mainly used to treat flu once patients have caught it. These resistance rates have increased rapidly since 2003, particularly in Asia.

“We were alarmed to find such a dramatic increase in drug resistance in circulating human influenza viruses in recent years,” said Dr. Rick Bright of the disease control centers. “Our report has broad implications for agencies and governments planning to stockpile these drugs for epidemic and pandemic strains of influenza.”

Indonesian health officials are also at a disadvantage when it comes to quickly identifying Bird Flu victims due to a lack of resources and organization:

Earlier in the week, the head of WPRO said at a conference that there were still many gaps in the health surveillance systems, so pivotal to detecting a new virus and mounting a response within a limited time.

“At the national level we need to improve further the capacity for surveillance and virological investigation. In addition, we need greater cooperation in sharing specimen samples,” said Dr Shigeru Omi, WPRO’s regional director in New Caledonia, an island in the South Pacific.

“Vietnam is on par with Thailand in health surveillance, but poorer countries like Cambodia and Laos don’t have the capacity due to the lack of resources,” Cordingley told IPS. “This is also too big for the WHO and FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization) to handle. We need a lot of international help.”

While it may be too dramatic to portray what is going on in Jakarta as mankind’s last chance to arrest any potential Bird Flu pandemic, the amount of attention being paid by international health officials and the current outbreak being termed “an epidemic” by at least some of the authorities in Indonesia lead one to the inescapable conclusion that this may be a defining moment in the fight to prevent an outbreak of a disease that could decimate the human population of planet earth.

UPDATE 9/23

First of all I have to say it’s a little disconcerting that not very many bloggers are posting about this today. Glenn Reynolds has a little blurb from AP but otherwise, not much in the way of sounding the alarm.

An exception is Bird Dog at Maggie’s Farm. He has an outstanding post with an easy to understand explanation of exactly what a virus is and how the Avian Flu virus is different from other flu viruses. This is a post I will link to everytime I blog about Bird Flu. The information is invaluable for us lay people in trying to get a handle on a disease that looks more and more like it will change our lives forever. Thanks, BD.

The irresponsibility of the Chinese government in combating an outbreak of bird flu in Yushu in northwestern Qinghai is almost incomprehensible. Rather than cooperate with international health officials to determine the extent and seriousness of the flare up of the disease, Chinese bureaucrats closed off that part of the country to all foreigners. What happened next could have come out of a monk’s account of epidemic disease from the middle ages:

When natives living further from the area made a trip to the farming community, they discovered that it had “vanished” together with 3 of its surrounding villages. Only some ruins, blocks from collapsed walls, remained. Apparently, the farms and villages had been flattened and there were signs that they had been razed.

It is believed that some inhabitants from those 3 villages were workers in the farm. Around 200 people were estimated to have inhabited or worked in those 3 villages and the farm. There whereabouts are, as yet, unknown.

The above translation of a boxun report suggest that three villages were razed in response to unrest linked to a forced bird flu quarantine in Yushu in northwestern Qinghai in China. China has imposed news blackouts and arrested reporters in the past, so verifiable news from the area is difficult to obtain.

If true, the razing of villages and disappearance of 200 people may point to other, more serious problems. Has the epidemic spread to humans and the Chinese government doesn’t want anyone to know?

This is from a translated page on a Chinese message board. It is completely unconfirmed but at the least, it demonstrates what happens in a society when the free flow of information is impeded by government:

News outside of China however, points toward a virulent strain of H5N1 linked to Qinghai Lake has killed ducks and geese in several areas of southern Siberia in Russia as well as the adjacent region in Kazakhstan. There are now reports of five suspected cases of H5N1 in Kazakhstan linked to infected geese, suggesting many similar cases would be possible in Qingahi and Xinjiang provinces in China, where there have been three outbreaks linked to migratory birds and all involved dead geese.

Although it is possible that the ability to infect humans has been recently acquired, boxun reports in May and June described human fatalities in the Qinghai Lake region. In addition, several strains of H5N1 capable of infecting humans were also described.

The news blackout in China as well as additional suspect cases in neighboring Sichuan province which may be spreading further south to Yunnan province has suggested that a raging H5N1 pandemic in China is being covered-up.

The fact that the government has prevented international officials from visiting the province is extremely troubling. It suggests that the bird flu epidemic is out of control in one and perhaps two provinces.

The avian flu outbreak at Lake Qinghai was first identified by Chinese wildlife officials at the end of April. Initially it was confined to a small islet in the huge salt lake, where geese suddenly began to act spasmodically, then to collapse and die. By mid-May it had spread through the lake’s entire avian population, killing thousands of birds. An ornithologist called it “the biggest and most extensively mortal avian influenza event ever seen in wild birds.”

Chinese scientists, meanwhile, were horrified by the virulence of the new strain: when mice were infected they died even quicker than when injected with “genotype Z,” the fearsome H5N1 variant currently killing farmers and their children in Vietnam.

Yi Guan, leader of a famed team of avian flu researchers who have been fighting the pandemic menace since 1997, complained to the British Guardian newspaper in July about the lackadaisical response of Chinese authorities to the unprecedented biological conflagration at Lake Qinghai.

“They have taken almost no action to control this outbreak. They should have asked for international support. These birds will go to India and Bangladesh and there they will meet birds that come from Europe.” Yi Guan called for the creation of an international task force to monitor the wild bird pandemic, as well as the relaxation of rules that prevent the free movement of foreign scientists to outbreak zones in China.

In fact, as mentioned above, thanks to the inaction of Chinese officials, the pandemic has spread to Siberia:

Russia said on Tuesday an outbreak of bird flu in Chelyabinsk was dangerous to humans, as teams of sanitary workers destroyed birds in Siberia in an attempt to prevent the westward spread of the deadly virus.

The H5N1 strain of bird flu is behind the outbreak in Chelyabinsk, a city in the Ural mountains, the Emergencies Ministry said in a statement.

It said no cases among humans have been confirmed in Russia.

“Measures are being taken to prevent the spreading of the infection among domestic birds and to exclude the possibility of the infection moving to humans,” the statement added.

Russia is battling to contain a bird flu outbreak, which top health officials say has killed more than 11,000 birds countrywide and could spread westwards to Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

So what are the chances of avian flu morphing into a strain that can be transmitted human to human? According to Science Magazine, 100%:

The new US Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt told the Associated Press in early August that an influenza pandemic was now an “absolute certainty”, echoing repeated warnings from the WHO that it was “inevitable”. Likewise, Science magazine observed that expert opinion held the odds of a global outbreak as “100%”.

In the same grim spirit, the British media revealed that officials were scouring the country for suitable sites for mass mortuaries, based on official fears that avian flu could kill as many as 700,000 Britons. The Blair government is already conducting emergency simulations of a pandemic outbreak (“Operation Arctic Sea”) and is reported to have readied “Cobra” – a cabinet-level working group that coordinates government responses to national emergencies, like the recent London bombings, from a secret war room in Whitehall – to deal with an avian flu crisis.

According to the Centers for Disease Control, bird flu is now “endemic” to fowl in Southeast Asia. In other words, no local eradication efforts will be able to stem the tide of disease as it makes its way across the continent of Asia. Also according to the CDC, the bug is mutating to the point where it’s becoming easier to infect mammals as well as developing a resistance to some anti-viral medication:

New research suggests that currently circulating strains of H5 viruses are becoming more capable of causing disease (pathogenic) for mammals than earlier H5 viruses and are becoming more widespread in birds in the region. One study found that ducks infected with H5N1 are now shedding more virus for longer periods of time without showing any symptoms of illness. This has implications for the role of ducks in transmitting disease to other birds and possibly to humans as well. Additionally, other findings have documented H5 infection among pigs in China and H5 infection in felines (experimental infection in housecats in the Netherlands and isolation of H5N1 viruses from infected tigers and leopards in Thailand ), suggesting that cats could host or transmit the infection. These finding are particularly worrisome in light of the fact that reassortment of avian influenza genomes is most likely to occur when these viruses demonstrate a capacity to infect multiple species, as is now the case in Asia.

So where would the “tipping point” occur? There have already been 17 cases of known human to human contact, most of those occurring in Viet Nam. And recently, there was a scare in Indonesia as three people died of bird flu who lived in the same house:

There is also a question as to whether those 3 victims were exposed to the source at the same time or whether one of them was the index case and transmitted the virus to the other close family members sharing the same genetic susceptibility to the virus. As we know, the 2nd case showed symptoms 10-11 days after the 1st, the 3rd case a few days later: an unusual incubation period for avian influenza if they were exposed at the same time. My hypothesis is that they were grossly exposed to a (so far unknown) source, possibly repeatedly. Alternatively, one victim could have become a new infection source for the others who have similar genetic susceptibility.

Some health professionals point to Viet Nam as a possible starting point for the pandemic. But Viet Nam has been tremendously cooperative with international health officials in cataloging and studying the virus.

World Health Organization officials and other international health organizations have asked the Chinese government for details about three outbreaks in the remote western provinces of Qinghai and Xinjiang. In seeking to head off a potential human pandemic, international health experts said they require samples of the bird flu virus, analyses of its genetic makeup and specifics about the extent of the infection and efforts to contain it.

“It is a matter of urgency,” said Julie Hall, coordinator of communicable diseases in WHO’s China office. “It is an outbreak of potential international importance. We’re looking for China to share the information as quickly as possible and as much as possible.”

While Chinese authorities allowed a team of investigators from WHO and the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization to visit Qinghai last month, the government has yet to respond to a June 17 request by international health experts to travel to Xinjiang, U.N. officials said. The Chinese officials, saying the infection in Xinjiang has been contained, have given no indication they will authorize the trip.

U.N. officials and independent scientists said they were reluctant to publicly discuss their frustrations with China for fear the government would shut them out of the country. But officials and researchers said they were dismayed with the government’s secrecy, especially after China ran afoul of international agencies for its response to the SARS epidemic that began in 2002. China’s health minister was fired after the government acknowledged it covered up the SARS outbreak.

Viet Nam apparently learned its lesson from the SARS outbreak and have provided all the cooperation that the WHO has asked of them. But the Chinese government is suffering what can perhaps best be described as a hangover from the secretive society created by Mao and brutally enforced by Deng Xiaoping. Despite all the economic reforms, China still has a long way to go before becoming a grown up and responsible member of the international community.

Given this mindset, it’s entirely possible that the first cases of human to human transmission by casual contact could occur in China – it could occur and we wouldn’t realize it until it had already spread to other countries. By then it would be too late. Given the fact that we live in an age where international travel is commonplace, bird flu could be in half a dozen countries before the world would be able to react.

Glenn Reynolds for one, is still being cautious about pushing the panic button. I love Glenn Reynolds to death but for God’s sake Mr. Instapundit! When people whose job it is to calm us down start talking about “inevitable” pandemics with “100%” certainty, isn’t about time to hit the red button and raise the alarm? The government should be mobilizing every information source they have access to and start getting the word out now. There are steps people can take to minimize the risk of catching the bug. Those measures should be pounded home on every news channel every day from here on out.

Time may be running out. And most of us have done precious little to protect ourselves.

With the news today that a vaccine has been developed to counter Bird Flu, the race now begins to produce enough of the drug to immunize those most at risk during a possible pandemic:

The director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, said that although the vaccine that had undergone preliminary tests could be used on an emergency basis if a pandemic developed, it would still be several months before that vaccine was tested further and, if licensed, offered to the public.

“It’s good news,” Dr. Fauci said. “We have a vaccine.”

But he cautioned: “We don’t have all the vaccine we need to meet the possible demand. The critical issue now is, can we make enough vaccine, given the well-known inability of the vaccine industry to make enough vaccine?”

That shot by Dr. Fauci may be out of line. The vaccine industry has the ability to make enough doses. The problem has been both industry and government short sightedness:

The fact of the matter is that, compared to manufacturing drugs or other types of vaccine, producing flu vaccine is an exceedingly high-risk, low-profit, labor-intensive enterprise. Pharmaceutical companies have dumped the product because, in the words of a recent Washington Post article, it “has simply become too much trouble.” Liability costs, real or potential, comprise only part of an economic equation which also includes such factors as government regulation (including price controls), market unpredictability and production challenges unique to flu vaccines.

As the Times article points out, part of the problem is that vaccines need to be incubated using live chicken eggs.

Because the vaccine is made in chicken eggs, “a potential major stumbling block” to successful mass production is the number of eggs farmers can supply manufacturers, Dr. Fauci said.

If manufacturers can overcome such hurdles, the new vaccine could go far in averting a possible pandemic of human influenza, Dr. Fauci said.

Other problems that need to be overcome before the vaccine can be mass marketed include more human trials to determine dosage levels as well as tests to make sure the drug is safe for young children and adults over 65 years of age. This most recent round of tests was performed on healthy adult volunteers under 65.

Under normal circumstances, we’re still probably 3 to 5 years from having a viable vaccine. However, given the urgency of the situation, the drug could be used in an emergency to immunize those most at risk.

Ordinarily in a flu outbreak, at risk individuals would include the very old, the very young, and those whose immune system has been damaged due to diseases like AIDS. Also at high risk for infection are the health professionals who would be treating flu victims. If enough doses could be found to immunize these groups, the death toll for a pandemic could go down significantly.

The question being asked by governments and international health officials is are we going to be given enough time? Given the nature of the crisis, it’s going to be a race between our ability to defend against infection and the virus’s ability to mutate.

As this article in the Washington Post makes clear, there’s probably nothing that can be done to avoid what could turn out to be the most calamitous event in American history; the coming Bird Flu pandemic:

Public health officials preparing to battle what they view as an inevitable influenza pandemic say the world lacks the medical weapons to fight the disease effectively, and will not have them anytime soon.

Public health specialists and manufacturers are working frantically to develop vaccines, drugs, strategies for quarantining and treating the ill, and plans for international cooperation, but these efforts will take years. Meanwhile, the most dangerous strain of influenza to appear in decades—the H5N1 “bird flu” in Asia—is showing up in new populations of birds, and occasionally people, almost by the month, global health officials say.

If the virus were to start spreading in the next year, the world would have only a relative handful of doses of an experimental vaccine to defend against a disease that, history shows, could potentially kill millions. If the vaccine proved effective and every flu vaccine factory in the world started making it, the first doses would not be ready for four months. By then, the pathogen would probably be on every continent.

Am I being an alarmist? Am I overstating the potential for unmitigated disaster?

I wish I was. What the article makes clear and what international health officials have been saying for months is that it is only a matter of time before the strain of flu currently infecting millions of birds mutates into a pathogen not only with the ability to jump from birds to humans, but more catastrophically, a mutation that would enable it to leap from human to human via casual contact.

This would bring about a social and economic catastrophe the likes of which this country has never seen.

Other measures would go well beyond the conventional boundaries of public health: restricting international travel, shutting down transit systems or nationalizing supplies of critical medical equipment, such as surgical masks.

But Osterholm argues that such measures would fall far short. He predicts that a pandemic would cause widespread shutdowns of factories, transportation and other essential industries. To prepare, he says, authorities should identify and stockpile a list of perhaps 100 crucial products and resources that are essential to keep society functioning until the pandemic recedes and the survivors go back to work.

In order to contain the outbreak, the federal government will have to assume enormous powers, ordering the closing of schools, office buildings, factories, malls – anywhere and anyplace that large numbers of people congregate. The simple chore of shopping for food will become a nightmare as strict limits will be placed on the number of people that will be allowed in a store at any one time.

Every time you walk out of your house, you’ll have to think is this trip worth the risk of getting sick?

The strain on the public health system will be overwhelming. Hospitals will be filled to capacity. Workers on the front line of the epidemic – doctors, nurses, and other health care workers – will be hardest hit straining the ability of hospitals to deliver even basic services.

How do we know this? Because the US and the rest of the world went through a flu pandemic before; the Spanish Flu outbreak in 1918. That worldwide calamity killed more than 30 million people, 675,000 in the United States alone. By contrast, on average 36,000 deaths are attributed to flu each year in the United States.

Given the massive change in population density worldwide plus the advent of international air travel the World Health Organization is estimating that a Bird Flu pandemic could kill 300 million worldwide. Even their pie-in-the-sky best case scenario where the world is given another year or two to prepare places the number of dead at 7 million.

We may not have that long.

So what makes this version of the flu any different than the disease that strikes the US every winter?

Pandemic influenza is not an unusually bad version of the flu that appears each winter. Those outbreaks are caused by flu viruses that have been circulating for decades and change slightly year to year.

Pandemics are caused by strains of virus that are highly contagious and to which people have no immunity. Such strains are rare. They arise from the chance scrambling and recombination of an animal flu virus and a human one, resulting in a strain whose molecular identity is wholly new.

The reason Bird Flu has flared up in Asia is because of the close proximity of people and birds. This closeness has been seen throughout history as a prerequisite for viruses making the jump from animals to humans.

What has international health officials especially worried is that this particular flu’s mortality rate doesn’t moderate once it makes the jump to humans. Where the disease might have a mortality rate of 70% in birds, that number would be expected to fall precipitously once making the jump to humans, dropping to less than 10%. The reason is the simple evolutionary strategy of the bug. In order to survive it must keep infecting humans. To do that, it has to keep the host alive long enough to infect someone else. This gives our own body’s defenses time to marshall its immune forces to do battle with the invader.

However, this strain of Bird Flu has shown a 34% mortality rate. And while there’s a chance that figure will go down in any pandemic, compared to the 1-3% mortality of ordinary flu worldwide the numbers would still be catastrophic.

As for the economic effects, there would not be a parallel in American history. The reason goes to the heart of what globalization means to our economy and how economic activity in the United States is truly the engine that drives the economies of the world.

If the kinds of draconian quarantine measures contemplated by the government were initiated, the economy would deflate like a punctured balloon. Even if the CDC were able to contain the epidemic quickly – say, as quickly as a modern industrialized Hong Kong was able to contain the recent SARS outbreak, we’d still be looking at a period of about two months of government mandated reduced economic activity.

What would that mean for the economy?

The only comparable event we have to go on would be the economic impact of 9/11. And while there are as many estimates for that as there are economists, the GAO did a round-up of estimates that would seem to indicate that the attacks cost the US economy upwards of $165 billion in direct costs with a loss of perhaps as many as 175,000 jobs. Indirect costs that are still being felt today could be 3 times that much.

That was one attack in one city. The flu would hit several cities almost simultaneously and cause massive economic dislocation due to the virtual halt in economic activity in those and perhaps most regions of the country. I wouldn’t want to contemplate what that would mean over a two month period but given that imports and exports would be massively affected due to probable restrictions on loading and unloading of ships, I daresay that the entire world would be plunged into an economic nightmare that would overwhelm the ability of most third world government to deal with the crisis.

I really hope I’m wrong in all this. But seeing how the WHO has been scrambling for the last 18 months to try and contain each and every outbreak of human to human contact, I’m not very optimistic. And the CDC is taking the possibility very, very seriously.

As I said back in May when this story first started to percolate, I’m going to keep a close eye on the far east news services. I would suggest you do the same. Given the incompetence of the MSM, by the time they start reporting this story in earnest, the epidemic will be upon us and it will be too late.

I’m also going to make some common sense plans including purchasing a good supply of surgical masks and stock up on canned goods and other non-perishables.

I hope a year from now everyone can call me an old goat who panicked over nothing.

UPDATE

I thought that this would be a story tailor made for the Shadow Media but at the moment, only 9 blogs have linked to the WaPo article.

We (global mankind, science and public health) have not adequately anticipated and prepared for such a scenario, even though we could have seen it coming for a decade or more. If we could turn back time 15 years and know with certainty the pathogens we would face in the future, would there have been any better cooperation between continents? Would we have wasted so much talent, wealth and technology (ostensibly) to protect our people and way of life from acts of terrorism if we’d accepted that it was emerging infectious disease that posed by far the greater threat to our economy and to our very survival?

It seems we may be very near the moment of truth. Is it too late to turn our swords into vaccines?

I don’t buy the argument but he has a point (we would have to face both – there’s no “either, or” – much like our dilemma at the outset of WW II: Germany or Japan?)

His point about cooperation is spot on. Read his post for how that pandemic might be nipped in its infancy with an international pooling of resources.

UPDATE II

It appears that most of the other A-list bloggers don’t find this story worth their time with the exception of Glenn Reynolds, who thinks we should be worried “a bit” and John Cole who at least has the common sense to share a small degree of my concern:

This isnâ€™t going away, it canâ€™t be negotiated, so we better start preparing. Just as a curious side note, the the late night crazies at Art Bellâ€™s Coast to Coast have been fretting about this for years.

What next! Will a Yeti walk out of the woods and show up in a bar in Yakima?